What does human cloning have to
do with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people? In my opinion:
everything. With the recent
news about an otherworldly group called Raelians  and its Frankenstein-esque
laboratory, Clonaid  scientists, ethicists and theologians are
once again thrown into the incendiary debate about human cloning.

Ever since Mary Shelleys classic
novel Frankenstein,
in which her protagonist, Dr. Victor Frankenstein, accidentally creates a
monster, the idea of playing God, or co-creating with God, raises the fear
and fury among liberals and conservatives alike.

Who decides which
humans are cloned and for what purposes? in our desire to make a better human being, will we
invariably find ourselves slipping into the dangerous area of desiring to
make a master people  or a master race?

The concern of just how far we humans
should tamper with ourselves undoubtedly raises scientific queries, but the
most pressing concern
is a moral one: Who decides which humans are cloned and for what purposes?
While all roads to hell are paved with good intentions, in our desires to
cease aging, death and dying, what eternal road to perdition might we find
ourselves traveling on? And in our desire to make a better human being, will
we invariably find ourselves slipping into the dangerous area of desiring
to make a master people  or a master race?

Catholic theologian James Carroll
raises that concern when he said, "The revulsion prompted by cloning points to its problems  the
very asexuality of this kind of reproduction; the prospect that cloned human
beings will, by constitution, be physically or socially inferior to others;
conversely, the possibility that the genetic manipulation of cloning science
will bring about a super-species the commingling of biology and computer
science to create a trans-human."

While this debate may not seem particularly relevant to
LGBT issues, the debate is integral because it raises not only the question
whether LGBT people will be cloned, but also whether we will exist as one
of the many diverse faces of human life and of God.

Given this countrys vicissitudinous
climate concerning queer civil rights, from time-to-time we find our lives
as LGBT people precariously
hanging on a thread, and sometimes free-falling into an abyss of ultraconservative
politics. In lives that at times seem precarious, I also worry in the human
cloning debate whether our inimitable being and essence as LGBT people can
ostensibly be redesigned, if not completely decimated, in a Petri dish.

Eugenicists, who many people believe
play God with the human race  because their primary focus is the study of hereditary
improvement, especially of human improvement by genetic engineering  raise
for us LGBT people grave concerns about what they think about our genetic
makeup.

In an essentialist
argument where biology is believed to determine ones destiny, all people who are marginal to
mainstream society  women, the physically challenged, people of color,
LGBT people, etc  must tune into this debate about human cloning.

In an essentialist argument where
biology is believed to determine ones destiny, all people who are marginal to mainstream society  women,
the physically challenged, people of color, LGBT people, etc  must
tune into this debate about human cloning.

Some views hold that LGBT people are genetically flawed,
from a scientific point of view, and an abomination before God, from both
religious fundamentalist and conservative points of view (which are a lot
more pervasive in religious thought then we like to think). In this view,
our unique way of being sexual and loving in the world is not only looked
upon as an aberration to human sexuality, but we can also ostensibly be viewed
as an abhorrence to human life itself, who might need to be exterminated.

With science having an authoritative voice in society,
any counter moral and religious arguments on our behalf lose footing. We
like to believe that the field of science is objective and value-free of
human biases and bigotries. However, scientists are human beings who analyze
and interpret their datum from their subjective and often times politically-motivated
viewpoints.

A classic example of how politics
informs science is Nazi Germanys extermination plan for gay men. Paragraph
175 of the German Criminal Code differentiated between the type of persecution
that non-German
gay men and German gay men received because of a quasi-scientific and racist
ideology of racial purity. Richard Plant makes this point in The Pink
Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals, when he stated, "The
polices of persecution carried out toward non-German homosexuals in the occupied
territories differed significantly from those directed against Germans gays.
The Aryan race was to be freed of contagion; the demise of degenerate subjects/
peoples was to be hastened."

When we miss the essential point that all of human life
is varied, precious, limited, and of equal worth, we ignore the unique gifts
that each life brings to the world. However, in our effort to make the perfect
human being or perfect race of people, we view our limits as human beings
as a negative that must be improved upon if not removed.

"If limits are the essence of human personhood,
what sort of creature do we have when such heretofore basic limits begin
to fall? Isnt it in learning to cope with our limits, whether mortality
or, say, emotional hypersensitivity, that we become who we are? What are
human beings becoming?" Carroll asks.

What we are becoming in our experimentation with ourselves,
with Clonaid or other human cloning laboratories around the world, is to
not be another Nazi Germany.

Clonaid began its life inconspicuously in a mailbox in
the Caribbean. Now, Clonaid is conspicuously housed on a sprawling Canadian
compound in Quebec near the Vermont border call UFO-land. Founded by His
Holiness Rael a.k.a. Claude Vorilhon, a former French journalist and racecar
driver and author of Lets Welcome Our Father From Space. Rael
has 55,000 adherents who believes, like he does, that all human life derives
from aliens out in space.

At present, no one believes Clonaids
claim that they have cloned a baby girl named Eve, and that another cloned
baby belonging
to a lesbian couple in the Netherlands is on its way. Their science fiction
aura and evolutionary theory leave little room for credibility.

While the debate about
whether Eve exists or not is an important one, the larger debate about
the bioethics of human
cloning must not escape us In our search to scientifically advance and improve
ourselves with human cloning, let us not shortchange ourselves or Gods
tapestry of us.

While the debate about whether Eve
exists or not is an important one, the larger debate about the bioethics
of human cloning must not escape us. I also
hope this debate will not lose what we will do with the variety of human lives
before us. In our search to scientifically advance and improve ourselves with
human cloning, let us not shortchange ourselves or Gods tapestry of us.

If we do, Shellys novel, Frankenstein, serves as a caveat for
us, because it not only shows us what monsters we can make, but it also shows
us what monsters we can easily become.